French Moves

The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Felicia McCarren

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

First book in English on hip hop in French cultural context

French Moves

The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Felicia McCarren

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Description

For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown another face of France: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic.

French hip-hoppers subscribe to U.S. black culture to articulate their own difference, but in France hip-hop was championed by a Socialist cultural policy, subsumed into the cultural heritage, and instituted as a pedagogy. France supported hip-hop dance as an art of the suburbs: a multicultural mix of North African, African and Asian forms that circulate with classical and contemporary dance performance. French hip-hop develops into concert dance, becoming a civic discourse and legitimate employment, not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture. It nuances an Anglo-Saxon model of identity politics with a francophone identity poetics and grants its dancers a national profile as artists who develop dance techniques and transmit body-based knowledge.

This book, the first in English to introduce readers to the French hip-hop movement, analyzes the choreographic development of hip-hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip-hoppers move beyond the suburbs, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.

French Moves

The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Felicia McCarren

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Contents
Introduction: "French?": Circulation, Immigration and Assimilation
Part I: Politics and poetics
Chapter 1: Hop Hop Citizens: politics, culture and performance
Chapter 2: Hip Hop Dance "speaks" French: droit de citer
Chapter 3: Hip Hop as post-colonial representation: Farid Berki's Invisible Armada and Exodust
Part II: Technology and techniques
Chapter 4: Dancing In and Out of the Box: Frank II Louise's Drop It!(2000) and Compagnie Choream's Epsilon (1999)
Chapter 5: Breaking history: Helène Cixous' L'histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, Roi du Cambodge and Yiphun Chiem's Apsara (2007)
Chapter 6: Techniques: French urban dance in intellectual context
Conclusion

French Moves

The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Felicia McCarren

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Author Information

Felicia McCarren is Professor of French at Tulane University. From hip-hop dance classes in the Paris suburbs to the national staging and international touring of French urban dance companies, she follows the French "mouv'" of a state-funded choreographic phenomenon.

French Moves

The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Felicia McCarren

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Reviews and Awards

2014 Outstanding Publication Award by the Congress on Research in Dance
2013 The Society of Dance History Scholars de la Torre Bueno Prize

"Considering politics, poetics, techniques and technologies, the book has exciting and important implications for how we think about bodies and borders. It will be of great interest to anyone thinking through issues of citizenship and difference, from the end of the twentieth century up through the complexities of identity and nation in present-day France." --Roxanne Panchasi, New Books in French Studies

"Felicia McCarren has succeeded brilliantly in taking dance out of its disciplinary confines, showing how vital a consideration of hip-hop is to any attempt to understand the dynamics of race and identity in contemporary France; the progress of the globalization of culture; the transformational power of moving bodes; and the mutually constitutive relation between bodies and technologies. McCarren makes it impossible for semiotics or cultural theory to remain indifferent to dance." --Carrie Noland, author of Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture

"The strengths of McCarren's research lay both in the cross-disciplinary structural analysis of national ideology and state funding of the arts (and research on the arts) insofar as they relate to particular communities and individuals in complex national, social, and cultural situations. Likewise, McCarren's introduction to works that might not be widely known to scholars bring new perspectives on French concert dance and the ways in which dance might be read as part of debates on national and global politics." --H-France Review

"...Offers an original perspective on contemporary hip-hop theatre." -- Dance Review Journal

"This well-documented analysis succeeds in providing an accounting of the unique development of French hip hop dance and a commentary on contemporary French culture."--Contemporary French Civilization